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Vulnerability In Font Processing Library Affects Linux, OpenOffice, Firefox (softpedia.com)

Posted by timothy on from the well-stop-using-fonts dept.

An anonymous reader writes: If an application can embed fonts with special characters, then it's probably using the Graphite font processing library. This library has several security issues which an attacker can leverage to take control of your OS via remote code execution scenarios. The simple attack would be to deliver a malicious font via a Web page's CSS. The malformed font loads in Firefox, triggers the RCE exploit, and voila, your PC has a hole inside through which malware can creep in.

1 of 95 comments (clear)

  1. Hyperbole? Much? by Viol8 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    FTA:

    "The worst is an out-of-bounds read bug (CVE-2016-1521) that allows attackers to crash the system"

    Err no. It'll crash the browser (or whichever userspace program is using the library). Thats a bit different to crashing the kernel.

    Bring back the X Font Server and get off my lawn!